The leaked DVD screener drought has been broken with the release of the Denzel Washington movie Fences. The copy carries a Paramount Pictures "For Your Consideration" watermark. With more leaks said to be on the way, the group behind the leak informs TorrentFreak that they prefer not to brag about their achievement.

Christmas 2015 was a somewhat epic time for pirates with a cascade of high-quality screener copies of movies leaking onto the Internet. But while that period went with a bang, 2016 went out with a whimper.

Over the recent festive period, not one English language screener copy of a movie appeared online. Considering the banquet in the same period the previous year, that was quite a turnaround. While reasons are almost always tough to pinpoint, it’s likely that Hollywood has toughened up its security.

Nevertheless, it remains impossible to cover every angle, something that became evident during the past few hours when the first screener leak of 2017 hit the Internet. It’s Denzel Washington’s Fences, a film set in the 1950s about a former baseball player turned garbageman.

Fences enjoyed a Christmas Day release in the United States and currently has no ‘street date’ for DVD or Blu-ray. Last night, however, a copy ripped from a screener leaked online and rapidly spread. It was a P2P release, meaning that it was released onto peer-to-peer networks first, rather than a more structured ‘scene’ offering.

The quality of the release isn’t pristine like many of the screeners released last year, but downloaders are commenting that while HD would’ve been nice, the copy is perfectly watchable with decent audio. It weighs in at just over 2GB.

Another issue worthy of comment is the presence every now and again of a watermark that identifies this leak as coming from Paramount Studios. The mark states clearly that this is an awards screener so therefore it should’ve never been leaked to the public.